Organizations are cautious about safeguarding their digital assets and networks. However, their adversaries are always one step ahead. They keep trying new tactics to attack their targets and achieve their nefarious designs. As a result, no matter how hard they bolster their defenses, they can be attacked anytime, anywhere. So, what is the way out to deal with them? MITRE ATT&CK provides a framework for enhancing your endpoint security against evolving threats.
This post thoroughly explores the MITRE ATT&CK framework, its advantages, and use cases.
What Is MITRE ATT&CK Framework?
The MITRE ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques & Common Knowledge) framework comprises a vast knowledge base of tactics and techniques adversaries use in the real world. This serves as a foundation for building threat models and design and security architecture methodologies. Its architecture shows how third-party actors achieve their goals within a target network.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework, a globally recognized knowledge base, was developed by the reputable MITRE Corporation. It’s a great resource for cyber professionals to guard against evolving, sophisticated threats.
MITRE ATT&CK Matrices
MITRE ATT&CK Matrices provide a structured and comprehensive framework for understanding and analyzing adversary behavior.
This includes the following:
- Enterprise Matrix: focuses on TTPs to target enterprise networks, including Windows, macOS, Linux, cloud, and network infrastructure.
- Mobile Matrix: covers TTPs about mobile devices, including Android and iOS platforms.
- ICS Matrix: targets Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT) environments.
These three matrices are divided into tactics and techniques. It also includes sub-techniques, which provide more granular descriptions of adversary actions.
The primary goal of the ATT&CK matrices is to share intelligence, develop defense strategies, and prioritize security efforts to help security professionals handle the most dreadful attack scenario.
Key Components of MITRE ATT&CK Framework
The primary components of the MITRE ATT&CK framework are:
- Tactics: These are tactical goals of adversaries used during an attack.
- Techniques: This answers how to achieve a tactical goal.
- Sub-techniques: Techniques are further divided into various subcategories.
- Procedures: This explains what and how an attack is made.
- Mitigations: The framework also provides a list of mitigations that can be applied to prevent, detect, or respond to each technique or sub-technique.
- Groups: ATT&CK tracks various adversary groups and maps their tactics and techniques.
- Software: It lists the tools and software employed by adversaries.
Understanding MITRE ATT&CK Tactics
The MITRE ATT&CK framework studies adversary behavior carefully and categorizes it into 14 tactics and various techniques. Each of these tactics indicates a specific objective that the attacker tries to achieve during the objective. Here are the key tactics in the Enterprise Matrix:
| Tactic | Description | Examples |
| Reconnaissance | Involves information gathering about target networks and systems. | Victim host information, wordlist scanning, hardware scanning, gathering credential information. |
| Resource Development | Includes assets to support an attack, | Acquiring access and infrastructure compromises accounts, compromised systems, or stolen credentials. . |
| Initial Access | Making an entry into a network/system by exploiting vulnerabilities or phishing. | Process Injection. |
| Execution | Injecting malware or other tools to carry out the attack. | Cloud Administration Command, Command, and Scripting Interpreter. |
| Persistence | Maintaining access to the compromised system or network over time. | Account manipulation, highjack execution flow. |
| Privilege Escalation | Continuously increasing the access level | Abuse elevation control mechanism, external remote service, implant internal image, and more. |
| Defense Evasion | Techniques used to avoid detection by security tools and systems. | Access token manipulation, brute force, forced authentication, input capture. |
| Credential Access | Accessing valid user credentials to access systems or networks. | Adversary-in-the-middle, input capture, network sniffing. |
| Discovery | Identifying and mapping the network, systems, and data to be targeted. | Debugger evasion, device driver discovery, log enumeration, network share discovery. |
| Lateral Movement | Moving laterally within the network. | Lateral tool transfer, remote service, exploitation of remote services. |
| Collection | Collecting sensitive data. | Clipboard data, data from cloud service, browser session hijacking. |
| Command and Control | Establishing communication channels with the attacker’s command center | Application layer protocol, content injection, data encoding. |
| Exfiltration | Removing stolen data from the compromised system. | Automated exfiltration, exfiltration over C2 channel. |
| Impact | Damaging targeted systems or data. | Account access removal, data manipulation, defacement, firmware corruption |
To know more about techniques in detail, click here.
Additional MITRE ATT&CK Resources
Apart from the MITRE ATT&CK framework, there are multiple ways to view and work from the following resources:
- Data Sources: Contains log data or system data sources that security teams can monitor to understand the evidence of attack techniques.
- Mitigations: Comprises an index of all mitigations mentioned in the knowledge base that users can access.
- Groups: An index of tactics used by adversaries.
- Software: An index of malicious software or services.
- Campaign: A database of attacks carried out by groups and relevant information.
What is MITRE ATT&CK Navigator Tool?
The MITRE ATT&CK Navigator is a helpful open-source tool for working with the ATT&CK knowledge base. Security teams use it to quickly find, filter, make notes, and present information from the database.
With the Navigator, teams can quickly understand specific threat groups’ tactics and techniques. They can identify what software is used to carry out certain techniques. They can also match up defenses to particular techniques used by attackers.
This allows teams to export results in formats like JSON, Excel, and SVG graphics for presentations. Teams can use an online version hosted on GitHub or download it locally to their computers.
The MITRE ATT&CK Navigator is a handy tool that helps security professionals effectively work with and understand ATT&CK knowledge to improve their cyber defenses.
Features of MITRE’s Navigator Tool
Some of the key features of MITRE’s Navigator tool include:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Layers | Organizes and displays information using layers that include Threat Actor Layers, Importing Layers, and Custom Layers. |
| Search Functionality | Allows to search multiple categories simultaneously. |
| Visualization | Helps in visualizing defensive coverage for red/blue team operations, and threat intelligence. |
| Export Options | Allows exporting data in JSON, SVG, and Excel file formats. |
| Customization | Allows customization to suit specific needs, such as adding custom notations or colors. |
| Integration | Integrates with Cyber Analytics Repository (CAR) and Malware Archeology Windows ATT&CK Logging Cheat Sheet. |
| Real-World Scenarios | Uses real-world software and scenarios |
| Incident Response | Assists Incident Response (IR) teams to decide the nature of threats. |
| Threat Intelligence | Helps in understanding attack vectors. |
| Cybersecurity Strategy | Used to plan cybersecurity strategies and build defenses. |
Use Cases: MITRE ATT&CK Framework
Organizations use MITRE ATT&CK to enhance their security operations and bolster their security defenses:
- Threat detection and incident response: The MITRE ATT&CK data and knowledge base are valuable for security teams. Various enterprise security tools, such as SIEM, UEBA, EDR, and XDR, can leverage MITRE ATT&CK data to enhance threat intelligence and activate incident response strategies effectively.
MITRE ATT&CK helps CISOs prioritize security threats by proactively identifying threats and techniques, mapping security controls to known attack techniques, and using threat hunting and incident response.
- Proactive threat hunting: This helps security experts search their networks for the threats that may have slipped from their radar. ATT&CK’s extensive details on adversary tactics offer starting points for initiating or continuing threat-hunting activities.
- Attack simulation: Security teams can replicate real-world cyberattacks using ATT&CK information. These simulations help assess the efficacy of security protocols, procedures, and solutions.
- Security Gap Analysis and SOC Maturity Assessments: The MITRE ATT&CK framework helps in Security Gap Analysis by providing a comprehensive knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques.
It enables organizations to map their defensive capabilities against known threats and identify gaps. It also aids in SOC Maturity Assessments by establishing a benchmark for evaluating an organization’s security operations capabilities and maturity levels against industry best practices.
MITRE ATT&CK Vs. Cyber Kill Chain
Like the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Lockheed Martin’s Cyber Kill Chain views cyberattacks as a sequence of strategies. Some tactics share common names between the two models, but their differences become apparent beyond that point. This model serves more as a framework than an extensive knowledge repository like MITRE ATT&CK.
It focuses on seven tactics: Reconnaissance, Weaponization, Delivery, Exploitation, Installation, and Command and Control Actions on Objectives. Here are the key differences:
| Aspect | MITRE ATT&CK | Cyber Kill Chain |
| Purpose | Comprehensive knowledge base of adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures. | A model describing the sequential phases of a cyber attack. |
| Focus | Detailed description of the full attack lifecycle. | High-level overview. |
| Content | Constantly updated with new TTPs. | A fixed set of stages: reconnaissance, weaponization, delivery, exploitation, installation, command & control, actions on the objective. |
| Use Case | Includes the latest threats, techniques, and mitigation strategies. | Understand the overall attack process and identify opportunities for disruption. |
| Approach | Provides a standardized framework for analyzing cyber threats. | Outlines the general flow of an attack. |
| Level of Detail | Granular and specific in nature and scope. | Broad and conceptual. |
| Frequency of updates | Regularly updated. | Static model and not regularly updated. |
Advantages of using MITRE ATT&CK for modern cyber threats
The MITRE ATT&CK framework offers several advantages, including:
- Providing a comprehensive knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques, which allows organizations to devise effective strategies to counter these threats.
- Helping design real-world scenarios to test their defenses against known threats.
- Building customizable defense strategies based on specific organization needs or scenarios.
- Improving threat awareness by understanding and countering known adversarial behaviors.
- Enhancing threat detection capabilities by providing detailed information on tactics.
- Providing threat intelligence and assisting in understanding attack vectors.
- Improving incident response by determining the nature of threats and methods to mitigate them.
Conclusion
There are many cybersecurity frameworks, but none are as comprehensive and advanced as the MITRE ATT&CK framework. That is because it maps almost everything from both the attacker’s and the defender’s perspectives and provides insights about dealing with various threat actors.
Unlocking the full potential of comprehensive frameworks like ATT&CK presents a significant challenge for security teams. Not all security teams know how to extract the full advantage of the framework.
At SecureLayer7, we have a team of experts who can help you seamlessly adopt the framework to enhance your cyber resilience. Want to know more? Contact us to learn how we can help.
